The CURL Project Drops Bug Bounties Due To AI Slop

January 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Over the past years, the author of the cURL project, [Daniel Stenberg], has repeatedly complained about the increasingly poor quality of bug reports filed due to LLM chatbot-induced confabulations, also known as ‘AI slop’. This has now led the project to suspend its bug bounty program starting February 1, 2026.

Examples of such slop are provided by [Daniel] in a GitHub gist, which covers a wide range of very intimidating-looking vulnerabilities and seemingly clear exploits. Except that none of them are vulnerabilities when actually examined by a knowledgeable developer. Each is a lengthy word salad that an LLM churned out in seconds, yet which takes a human significantly longer to parse before dealing with the typical diatribe from the submitter.

Although there are undoubtedly still valid reports coming in, the truth of the matter is that the ease with which bogus reports can be generated by anyone who has access to an LLM chatbot and some spare time has completely flooded the bug bounty system and is overwhelming the very human developers who have to dig through the proverbial midden to find that one diamond ring.

We have mentioned before how troubled bounty programs are for open source, and how projects like Mesa have already had to fight off AI slop incidents from people with zero understanding of software development.

LLM-Generated Newspaper Provides Ultimate In Niche Publications

January 26, 2026 by Tyler August 4 Comments

If you’re reading this, you probably have some fondness for human-crafted language. After all, you’ve taken the time to navigate to Hackaday and read this, rather than ask your favoured LLM to trawl the web and summarize what it finds for you. Perhaps you have no such pro-biological bias, and you just don’t know how to set up the stochastic parrot feed. If that’s the case, buckle up, because [Rafael Ben-Ari] has an article on how you can replace us with a suite of LLM agents.

The AI-focused paper has a more serious aesthetic, but it’s still seriously retro.

He actually has two: a tech news feed, focused on the AI industry, and a retrocomputing paper based on SimCity 2000’s internal newspaper. Everything in both those papers is AI-generated; specifically, he’s using opencode to manage a whole dogpen of AI agents that serve as both reporters and editors, each in their own little sandbox.

Using opencode like this lets him vary the model by agent, potentially handing some tasks to small, locally-run models to save tokens for the more computationally-intensive tasks. It also allows each task to be assigned to a different model if so desired. With the right prompting, you could produce a niche publication with exactly the topics that interest you, and none of the ones that don’t. In theory, you could take this toolkit — the implementation of which [Rafael] has shared on GitHub — to replace your daily dose of Hackaday, but we really hope you don’t. We’d miss you.

That’s news covered, and we’ve already seen the weather reported by “AI”— now we just need an agenetic sports section and some AI-generated funny papers. That’d be the whole newspaper. If only you could trust it.

Story via reddit.

Augmented Reality Project Utilizes The Nintendo DSi

January 25, 2026 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

[Bhaskar Das] has been tinkering with one of Nintendo’s more obscure handhelds, the DSi. The old-school console has been given a new job as part of an augmented reality app called AetherShell.

The concept is straightforward enough. The Nintendo DSi runs a small homebrew app which lets you use the stylus to make simple line drawings on the lower touchscreen. These drawings are then trucked out wirelessly as raw touch data via UDP packets, and fed into a Gemini tool which transforms them into animation frames. These are then sent to an iPhone app, which uses ARKit APIs and the phone’s camera to display the animations embedded into the surrounding environment via augmented reality.

One might question the utility of this project, given that the iPhone itself has a touch screen you can draw on, too. It’s a fair question, and one without a real answer, beyond the fact that sometimes it’s really fun to play with an old console and do weird things with it. Plus, there just isn’t enough DSi homebrew out in the world. We love to see more.

Continue reading “Augmented Reality Project Utilizes The Nintendo DSi” →

Bike Spokes, Made Of Rope

January 25, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 3 Comments

We know this one is a few years old, but unless you’re deep into the cycling scene, there’s a good chance this is the first time you’ve heard of [Ali Clarkson’s] foray into home made rope spokes.

The journey to home-made rope spoke begun all the way back in 2018, shortly after the company Berd introduced their very expensive rope spokes. Berd’s spokes are made of a hollow weaved ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) rope with very low creep. They claim wheels stronger than steel spoke equivalents at a fraction of the weight. Naturally forum users asked themselves, “well why can’t we make our own?” As it turns out, there are a handful of problems with trying this at home.

Continue reading “Bike Spokes, Made Of Rope” →

Hackaday Links: January 25, 2026

January 25, 2026 by Tom Nardi 2 Comments

If predictions hold steady, nearly half of the United States will be covered in snow by the time this post goes live, with the Northeast potentially getting buried under more than 18 inches. According to the National Weather Service, the “unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm will bring heavy snow from the central U.S. across the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and through the northeastern U.S. for the remainder of the weekend into Monday.” If that sounds like a fun snow day, they go on to clarify that “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts can be expected”, so keep that in mind. Hopefully you didn’t have any travel plans, as CNBC reported that more than 13,000 flights were canceled as of Friday night. If you’re looking to keep up with the latest developments, we recently came across StormWatch (GitHub repo), a slick open source weather dashboard that’s written entirely in HTML. Stay safe out there, hackers.

Speaking of travel, did you hear about Sebastian Heyneman’s Bogus Journey to Davos? The entrepreneur (or “Tech Bro” to use the parlance of our times) was in town to woo investors attending the World Economic Forum, but ended up spending the night in a Swiss jail cell because the authorities thought he might be a spy. Apparently he had brought along a prototype for the anti-fraud device he was hawking, and mistakenly left it laying on a table while he was rubbing shoulders. It was picked up by security guards and found to contain a very spooky ESP32 development board, so naturally he was whisked off for interrogation. A search of his hotel room uncovered more suspicious equipment, including an electric screwdriver and a soldering iron. Imagine if a child had gotten their hands on them?

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 25, 2026” →

Balancing A Turbine Rotor To 1 Milligram With A DIY Dynamic Balancer

January 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Although jet engines are theoretically quite simple devices, in reality they tread a fine line between working as intended and vaporizing into a cloud of lethal shrapnel. The main reason for this is the high rotational speed of the rotors, with any imbalance due to poor manufacturing or damage leading to undesirable outcomes. It’s for this reason that [AlfMart CNC Garage] on YouTube decided to spend some quality time building a balancer for his DIY RC turbine project and making sure it can prevent such a disaster scenario.

In the previous part of the series the turbine disc was machined out of inconel alloy, as the part will be subjected to significant heat as well when operating. To make sure that the disc is perfectly balanced, a dynamic balancing machine is required. The design that was settled on after a few failed attempts uses an ADXL335 accelerometer and Hall sensor hooked up to an ESP32, which is said to measure imbalance down to ~1 mg at 4,000 RPM.

A big part of the dynamic balancing machine is the isolation of external vibrations using a bearing-supported free-floating structure. With that taken care of, this made measuring the vibrations caused by an imbalanced rotor much easier to distinguish. The ESP32 is here basically just to read out the sensors and output the waveforms to a connected PC via serial, with the real work being a slow and methodical data interpretation and balancing by hand.

Continue reading “Balancing A Turbine Rotor To 1 Milligram With A DIY Dynamic Balancer” →

The edge of a laptop is shown with a USB cable plugged into it. the other end of the cable is plugged into a Raspberry Pi Zero.

SSH Over USB On A Raspberry Pi

January 25, 2026 by Aaron Beckendorf 18 Comments

Setting up access to a headless Raspberry Pi is one of those tasks that should take a few minutes, but for some reason always seems to take much longer. The most common method is to configure Wi-Fi access and an SSH service on the Pi before starting it, which can go wrong in many different ways. This author, for example, recently spent a few hours failing to set up a headless Pi on a network secured with Protected EAP, and was eventually driven to using SSH over Bluetooth. This could thankfully soon be a thing of the past, as [Paul Oberosler] developed a package for SSH over USB, which is included in the latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS.

The idea behind rpi-usb-gadget is that a Raspberry Pi in gadget mode can be plugged into a host machine, which recognizes it as a network adapter. The Pi itself is presented as a host on that network, and the host machine can then SSH into it. Additionally, using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), the Pi can use the host machine’s internet access. Gadget mode can be enabled and configured from the Raspberry Pi Imager. Setting up ICS is less plug-and-play, since an extra driver needs to be installed on Windows machines. Enabling gadget mode only lets the selected USB port work as a power input and USB network port, not as a host port for other peripherals.

An older way to get USB terminal access is using OTG mode, which we’ve seen used to simplify the configuration of a Pi as a simultaneous AP and client. If you want to set up headless access to Raspberry Pi desktop, we have a guide for that.

Thanks to [Gregg Levine] for the tip!